Nordenholt's Million

by J. J. Connington

  “The Leviathan’s life-blood is the system of communications throughout the country; and I doubt if we can cripple that sufficiently rapidly and effectively to bring about the downfall. It would take too long and excite too much opposition if we did it thoroughly. We must have something subtler, Flint, something which will strike at each individual intelligence and isolate it from its fellows as far as possible. It’s my old problem of the breaking-strain again on the very widest scale. We must find some psychological weapon to help us. Nothing else will do.”

  It seemed as though he were appealing to me for suggestions, but I had nothing to offer. I had never considered such a problem; and at first sight it certainly seemed insoluble. Given that men already had the certainty of death before them, what stronger motive could one bring to bear?

  “I must think over it further,” he said at last, “I think I see a glimmering of some possibilities. After all, it’s my own line.”

  He dropped the subject and seemed to sink into his own thoughts for a time. When he broke the silence once more, it was on an entirely different subject.

  “I wonder if you ever read the Norse mythology, Flint? No? Well, you’ve missed something. The gods of Greece were a poor lot, a kind of divine collection of Fermiers Généraux with much the same tastes; but the Scandinavian divinities were in a different class. They were human in a way; but their humanity wasn’t of the baser sort. And over them all hung that doom of Ragnarök, their Twilight, when the forces of Evil would be loosed for the final struggle to bring darkness upon the earth. It’s the strangest forecast of our present crisis. As Ragnarök drew near, brother was to turn against brother; bloodshed was to sweep the land. Then was to come the Winter, three years long, when all trees were to fail and all fruits perish, while the race of men died by hunger and cold and violence. And with Ragnarök the very Gods themselves were to pass away in their struggle with all the Forces of Evil and Darkness.

  “But they were only half-gods, deified men. Behind them, the All-Father stood; and beyond that time of terror there lay the hope of Gimle, the new age when all would again be young and fair.

  “I look beyond these coming horrors to a new Gimle, Flint; a time when Earth will renew her youth and we shall shake free from all the trammels which this dying civilisation has twined about our feet. It will come, I feel sure. But only a few of us leaders will see it. The strain will be too much for us; only the very toughest will survive. But each of us must work to the very last breath to save something upon which we can build anew. There must be no shrinking in either will or emotion. I warn you that it will be terrible. To save mankind from the terror of the giants, Odin gave his eye to Mimir in return for a draught of the Well of Knowledge. Some of us will have to give our lives . . . A few of us will lose our very souls. . . . It will be worth it!”

  I was amazed to find this train of mysticism in that cold mind. Yet, after all, is it surprising? Almost all the great men of history have been mystics of one kind or another. Nordenholt rose; and something which had burned in his eyes died out suddenly. He went to the roll-top desk and took from it a bundle of papers.

  “Here are your instructions, Flint. Everything has been foreseen, I think, for the start. Follow them implicitly as far as they go; and after that I trust you to carry out the further steps which you will see are required.”

  As he was shaking hands with me, another thought seemed to strike him.

  “By the way, of course you understand that the whole of this scheme depends for success on our being able to exterminate these bacilli? If we cannot do that, they will simply attack any nitrogenous manure which we use. I am putting my bacteriologists on to the problem at once; but in any case the nitrogen scheme must go ahead. Without it, no success is possible, even if we destroyed B. diazotans. So go ahead.”

  His car awaited me at the door. On the drive home, I saw in the streets crowds gathered around hoarding after hoarding and staring up at enormous placards which had just been posted. The smaller type was invisible to me; but gigantic lettering caught my eye as I passed:

  NITROGEN

  ONE MILLION MEN WANTED

  NORDENHOLT

  CHAPTER VII

  NORDENHOLT’S MILLION

  OF all the incidents in that afternoon, I think the sight of these placards brought home to me most forcibly two of the salient characteristics of Nordenholt’s many-sided mind: his foresight and his self-reliance. Their appearance in the streets at that moment showed that they formed part of a plan which had been decided upon several days in advance, since time had to be allowed for printing and distributing them; whilst the fact that they were being posted up within two hours of the close of the meeting proved that Nordenholt had never had the slightest doubt of his success in dominating the Ministers.

  Later on, I became familiar with these posters. They were not identical by any means; and I learned to expect a difference in their wording according to the district in which they were posted up. The methods of varied personal appeal had long been familiar to the advertising world; but I found that Nordenholt had broken away from tradition and had staked everything upon his knowledge of the human mind. In these advertisements his psychological instinct was developed in an uncanny degree which was clear enough to me, who knew the secret; but I doubt if any man without my knowledge would have seen through the superficial aspect of them quite so readily.

  In this first stage of his campaign he had to conceal his hand. The advertisements were merely the first great net which he spread in order to capture every man who would be at all likely to be useful to him, while the meshes had to be left wide enough to allow the undesirable types to slip through. The proclamations—for they really took this form—set forth concisely the exact danger which threatened the food-supply of the country; explained why it was essential that immense masses of nitrogenous material must be manufactured; and called for the immediate enrolment of volunteers from selected trades and professions.

  As a primary inducement, the scale of remuneration offered was far above the normal pay in any given line. It was, in fact, so high that I fell at once to calculating the approximate total of wages which would be payable weekly; and the figures took me by surprise when I worked them out. No single private fortune, however gigantic, could have kept the machinery running for even a few months at the uttermost. When I pointed this out to Nordenholt he seemed amused and rather taken aback; but his surprise was at my obtuseness and not at my calculations.

  “Well, I’m slightly astonished, Flint. I thought you would have seen deeper into it than that. Hasn’t it occurred to you that within six weeks, money, as we understand it, will be valueless? If we pay up during the time we are getting things arranged, that will be all that is required. Once the colony is founded, there will be no trade between it and the outside world, naturally; and inside our own group we could arrange any type of currency we choose. But, as a matter of fact, we shall go on just as usual; and Treasury notes sufficient for the purpose are already being printed.”

  But the cash inducement was not the only one upon which he relied even in his preliminary moves. Patriotism, the spirit of public service, the promise of opportunities for talent and many other driving forces were enlisted in the campaign. These more specialised appeals were mainly sent out in the form of advertisements in the newspapers—great whole-page announcements which appeared in unusual places in the journals. I suppose to a man of enormous wealth most things are possible, especially when the wealth is coupled with a personality like Nordenholt’s; but it certainly amazed me to find his advertisements taking the place of the normal “latest news” space in many papers. Nor was this the only way in which his influence made itself felt. The editorial comments, and even the news columns of the journals, dealt at length with his scheme; and he secured the support of papers which were quite above any suspicion of being amenable to outside influence. On the face of it, of course, his plans—so far as they were made public—were obviously sound; but I cann
ot help feeling that below this almost unanimous chorus of praise in the leading articles there must be some influence at work beyond mere casual approbation. Very probably Nordenholt had seen his way to enlist the sympathy of editors by some more direct methods, possibly by calling the controllers of policy together and utilising his magnetic personality and persuasive powers.

  In my own field of work at the first, I found some difficulties in my dealings with the Trade Union officials, who were suspicious of our methods. They feared that we contemplated dilution on a huge scale; and they were anxious to know the details of our plans. I consulted Nordenholt on the point and found him prepared.

  “Of course that was bound to arise as soon as we began to move on a big scale. Well, you can assure them that we shall act strictly according to the law of the matter. Promise them that as far as working conditions go, we shall begin by letting the men fix their own hours of work; and if any man is dissatisfied with these, we will pay him on the spot a bonus of six months’ wages and let him leave instantly if he so desires.

  “Point out to them that, in the cases of some trades, I may have to enlist the majority of the Unionists in the country; and that I am not going to tie their hands by any previous arrangements: they shall settle the matter for themselves. If that doesn’t satisfy them, you may tell them definitely—and put it in writing if they wish—that under no circumstances will I expect my employés to work for longer hours or less pay than any other Trades Unionist in the country.”

  I jotted the phrase down in my pocket-book.

  “I may as well tell you, Flint, that I have given instructions to the recruiting offices. No Trades Union Leader will be engaged by me under any circumstances whatever. It’s real working men that I want; and I don’t think much of the Union leaders from the point of view of actual work.”

  He looked at me for a moment and I saw a faint smile on his face.

  “It seems to me, Flint, that even yet you haven’t managed to see this thing in perspective. You must really get into your mind the fact that there is going to be a clean break between the old system and the new one we are making. Look at the thing in all its bearings. Once we are up North, men shall work for me as I choose and for what I choose. There will be no Factory Acts and Trades Union regulations or any other hindrance to our affairs. They come here and try to put a spoke in my wheel? I don’t mind that at all. But I do see that they are trying, whether wilfully or through sheer ignorance, to hamper this work which is essential to the race. Therefore I propose to meet them with fair words. It’s not for me to enlighten their ignorance if it has persisted up to now in the face of all this. I make them that promise, and if they can’t understand its meaning, that is no affair of mine. We know, if they’re too dense to see it, that in a few months there won’t be a Trades Unionist left in the country, outside the colony! There will be no wages drawn outside our frontier; so even if I paid our men nothing, I should still be keeping my promise to the strict letter.”

  “I see your point,” I said; “all’s fair and so forth?”

  “Also, we shall have trouble, up there, I have no doubt. Probably there will be a ca’ canny party among our recruits. They will have every chance at first. I won’t interfere with them. But once the situation clears up a little, I shall deal with them—and I shall do it by the hand of their own fellows. They won’t last long. Now get along and promise these officials exactly what I have told you.”

  I offered no criticism of his methods. His brain was far better than mine. When I remember that he must have drafted the outlines of his scheme and arranged most of the preliminaries of its execution in less time than it would have taken me to decide upon a new factory-site, I am still lost in amazement at the combination of wide outlook and tremendous concentration of thought which the task involved.

  Despite the carefully-planned deterrents which appeared in the proclamations, the recruiting was enormous from the first. “Nordenholt’s Million”—as the popular phrase ran—was not really a million at all; but Nordenholt knew the influence of a round figure upon the public imagination and it was near enough for all practical purposes. He had looked on the thing in the broadest possible lines at the start, and had drawn up a rough classification for the use of the recruiting stations. To begin with, he limited the enlistment to men between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five; though exceptional cases received special consideration. On this basis, he expected to get all the men he required. Three-quarters of a million of these were to be married men with an upper limit of four children, preferably between the ages of six and twelve. In addition to this, he was prepared to accept half a million young unmarried men. Half a million unmarried girls were also selected. The net result of this was that in the end he obtained in round numbers the following classes:

  Husbands 750,000

  Wives 750,000

  Children 2,250,000

  Bachelors 500,000

  Girls 500,003

  Total 4,750,000

  That left a margin of a quarter of a million below his original estimate of five millions; and this he kept free for the time being, partly because some of the number would be made up by specialists who did not come under the general recruitment organisation and partly, possibly, for taking in at the last moment any cases which might be specially desirable.

  At a later date I had an opportunity of questioning him as to his reasons in laying down this classification: and they struck me as sound.

  “In the first place, I want a solid backbone to this enterprise, I get that by selecting the married men. They have got a stake in the thing already in their wives, and especially in their children. I know that the children mean the consumption of a vast quantity of food for which we shall get no direct return in the form of labour; but I believe that the steadying effect introduced by them will be worth the loss. We are going to put this colony under a strain which is about as great as human nature can bear; and I want everything on our side that can be brought there.

  “Then again, they will help to form a sort of public opinion. Don’t forget that the ultimate aim of this affair is to carry on the race. I could have done that by selecting bachelors and girls in equal numbers and simply going ahead on that basis. But we must have discipline; and unless you have some established order we should simply have ended by a Saturnalia. You couldn’t have prevented it, considering the nervous strain we are going to put on these people. I have no use for that sort of thing; so I chose a majority of men with families, whose natural instincts are to keep down the bacchanalian element among the unmarried.

  “But in addition to these married men, I needed others who had a free hand and who had only their own lives to risk. In certain lines, the unmarried man can be relied upon where the married man shivers in his shoes to some extent. That accounts for the bachelor element.

  “But, since a preponderance of males over females would be bound to lead to trouble, I had to enrol enough girls to bring up the balance. Possibly they may also serve to spur on the younger men to work; and they will be able to help in the actual task before us in a good many ways, like the Munition girls of the War period.”

  It seemed to me then the only possible solution of the problem; and it worked in practice. We can’t tell how things would have fared if any other arrangements had been made, so I must leave it at that. Anyway, I think Nordenholt enlisted two of the strongest instincts of humanity on his side in addition to the fear of hunger: and that was a definite gain.

  “Nordenholt’s Million” was, of course, a microcosm of the national industries. It would serve no purpose to catalogue the trades which were represented in it. Miners, iron- and steel-workers, electricians and makers of electrical machinery preponderated; but Nordenholt had looked ahead to agriculture and the needs of the population after the danger of famine was past.

  In the early stages, the statistical branch—recruited from the great insurance companies—was perhaps the hardest worked of all. The most diverse problems presen
ted themselves for treatment; and they could only be handled in the most rough-and-ready fashion until we were able to bring calculation to bear. Without the help of the actuaries, I believe that there would have been a collapse at various points, in spite of all our foresight.

  I have not attempted to do more than indicate in outline the activities which engrossed us at that time. In my memory, it lives as a period of frantic and often very successful improvisation. New problems cropped up at every turn. The decision of one day might entail a recasting of plans in some field which at first sight seemed totally divorced from the question under consideration. Each line of that complex system had to be kept abreast of the rest, so that there was no disjunction, no involuntary halt for one section to come up with the remainder, no clash between two departments of the organisation. And yet, somehow, it seemed to work with more smoothness than we had expected. Behind us all, seated at the nucleus of that complex web of activities, there was Nordenholt, seldom interfering but always ready to give a sharp decision should the need arise. And I think the presence of that cool intelligence behind us had a moral effect upon our minds. He never lessened our initiative, never showed any sign of vexation when things began to go wrong. He treated us all as colleagues, though we knew that he was our master. And under his examination, difficulties seemed to fade away in our hands.

  *****